“Most students bring a mini-supercomputer to school every day, a device with vast potential for learning,” he writes. However, “using phones for learning requires students to synthesize information and stay focused on a lesson or a discussion.” For some students, phones are a distraction, not a help.

Technology “has the potential to shrink achievement gaps,” writes Rob Redies, a Fern Creek High chemistry teacher, in an email. However, “I am actually seeing the opposite take place within my classroom.”

Barnwell has had success getting students to edit each other’s writing “using cloud-based word processing on their phones,” he writes. “I’ve also heard and read about other educators using phones for exciting applications: connecting students to content experts via social media, recording practice presentations, and creating ‘how-to’ videos for science experiments.”

However, his high school, which has many students reading below grade level, is struggling to use smartphones for learning. “I see students using cellphones and earbuds as a way to disengage with their peers,” said Fern Creek Principal Nathan Meyer. “The isolation squanders opportunities for students to learn to engage and communicate with empathy.”

“We find that mobile phone bans have very different effects on different types of students,” concludes a recent study on phone access and the achievement gap. “Banning mobile phones improves outcomes for the low-achieving students … the most, and has no significant impact on high achievers.”

Smartphones Don’t Make Us Dumb, writes cognitive scientist Dan Willingham in the New York Times. Digital devices don’t even destroy our attention spans. “We can focus,” he writes. But we may not want to.”

In a 2012 Pew survey, nearly 90 percent of teachers said their students can’t pay attention the way they could a few years ago.

It may be that digital devices have not left us unable to pay attention, but have made us unwilling to do so.

The digital world carries the promise of amusement that is constant, immediate and limitless. If a YouTube video isn’t funny in the first 10 seconds, why watch when I can instantly seek something better on BuzzFeed or Spotify? The Internet hasn’t shortened my attention span, but it has fixed a persistent thought in the back of my mind: Isn’t there’s something better to do than what I’m doing?

. . . People’s performance on basic laboratory tests of attention gets worse if a cellphone is merely visible nearby. In another experiment, people using a driving simulator were more likely to hit a pedestrian when their cellphone rang, even if they had planned in advance not to answer it.

Digital devices encourage “near constant outwardly directed thought” at the expense of time for reflection, Willingham concludes. “A flat cap on time with devices — the restriction we first think of for ourselves and our kids — might help.”

Wasting Time on the Internet is a new creative writing class at Penn this spring. Poet Kenneth Goldsmith hopes “clicking, SMSing, status-updating, and random surfing” can be “used as raw material for creating compelling and emotional works of literature.”

“Students will be required to stare at the screen for three hours, only interacting through chat rooms, bots, social media and listservs,” the course descriptions states. “Distraction, multi-tasking, and aimless drifting is mandatory.”

He’s tired of reading New York Times articles “that make us feel bad about spending so much time on the internet, about dividing our attention so many times,” he told Koebler. “I think it’s complete bullshit that the internet is making us dumber. I think the internet is making us smarter.”

“Electronic distraction and multitasking is the new surrealism,” Goldstein argues. “Surrealists wanted to get unconscious, well, we’re doing that now all the time.”

My sister was sent home from high school for wearing culottes. They were considered too close to shorts, which were banned. Girls had to wear a dress or skirt that hit no higher than mid-knee. Flip-flops weren’t banned because it never occurred to anyone to wear them to school. These were the rebellious ’60s. All our energy went into our hair.

Two dozen Georgia middle school students were suspended on charges of “terroristic threats” a Facebook post urged classmates to violate the dress code on the last week of school.

By Thursday, the post escalated to, “Everything they say we can’t wear, wear,” and, “We need the hallways packed and out of control” with everyone participating.

The end of the post threatens whoever might snitch.

Every student who shared or commented was suspended.

This is just one of many outbreaks, reports the Huffington Post. Girls are rejecting the idea that their clothing — or lack thereof — might distract boys.

In March, over 500 students at Haven Middle School in Evanston, Illinois, signed a petition opposing what they’d been told was a full ban on leggings and yoga pants.

Seventh grader Sophie Hasty explained to local news that teachers said the clothing was distracting for other students — rather, the boys. “We just want to be comfortable!” Hasty wrote to the Evanston Review.

Students at Wauwatosa West High School in Wisconsin want to wear short shorts. “They are just legs,” sophomore Elizabeth Kniffin told the local TV news. “Is that really too distracting? I understand that girls shouldn’t be coming to school with their butts or chests hanging out, but there has to be a happy medium.”

In the study, students in a classroom-like lab listened to six read-alouds on science topics (e.g., volcanoes, the solar system) in groups. Afterwards, children answered six questions about the lesson. The walls were either bare or very decorated.

“Kids spent a greater percentage of time looking away from the teacher in the decorated classroom (38 percent of the time vs. 28 percent of the time). And kids in the decorated classroom scored lower on the assessment (42 percent vs. 55 percent).”

Even if students don’t become habituated to classroom decorations, there could be a high cost to bare walls, writes Willingham. Teachers decorate to create in inviting social environment. It may be more difficult to build a sense of classroom community in a sterile environment.

Tiny rubber bands are knitted together to form a bracelet. When it’s pulled apart — which isn’t difficult — “a child suddenly has what feels like hundreds of little bands all over his desk.”

Of course this only happens at the exact moment you are trying to transition the class and the student suddenly finds himself in a panic because he is worried he will lose one precious tiny rubber band. Or worse, the student becomes worried that a friend will steal the bands, which of course involves lots of yelling and “hey, that’s mine! Nobody touch it!” Both scenarios ultimately ends with a total class disruption and involve a very frustrated teacher.

A new study (sponsored by an office-furniture company, Steelcase, so take it with a grain of salt) compared students in classrooms designed for “active learning,” including dynamic grouping of seats in small and large groups, multisensory engagement at different stations around the room, as well as the use of screens and other technology, to the more traditional “rows of seats” classrooms that are all but disappearing now. “90.32% of students perceived an increase in their engagement in the class with layouts designed for active learning, 80.65% said the new layout increased their ability to achieve a higher grade, and 70.04% their motivation to attend class.”

Even these layouts don’t give students a chance to “be alone with a teacher or with their thoughts,” Kamenetz writes. “So much classroom management effort is really spent on managing the noise-pollution issue, while sound privacy matters when a teacher needs to give a student critical feedback or just time to reflect on a question.”

Again and again, we are told in this information-overloaded digital age, complex and subtle arguments just won’t hold the reader’s or viewer’s attention. If you can’t keep it simple and punchy, you’ll lose your audience.

Maintaining attention is a skill that can be learned, he argues. Students need to exercise their “attention muscle” to strengthen it.

Just as we don’t expect people to develop their biceps by lifting two-pound weights, we can’t expect them to develop their attention by reading 140-character tweets, 200-word blog posts, or 300-word newspaper articles.

Young people raised on brief, simplified info-bits won’t realize what they’re missing, Schwartz believes. “Before we know it, the complexity and subtlety of the world we inhabit will be invisible to us when we try to make sense of what is going on around us.”

Tl;dr is an abbreviation used often online, in forums like Reddit, as a way of commenting on and dismissing someone else’s rant, diatribe, or impassioned outpouring. It stands for “too long; didn’t read.”

Articles are shortened to lists. Blogs are shortened to Tweets. And, Schwartz notes, with MOOCs the 45-minute college lecture–his own cherished medium–is being shortened to a series of five to eight- minute long video chunks interspersed with comprehension questions.

Kamenetz sees the “pithy, attention-grabbing intellectual style” as a sign of a new power dynamic. “Many people have something to say.” In the traditional classroom, “traditional professors, by virtue of their traditional power, claim the droit du seigneur to bore the bejeezus out of everyone by droning on with no editing whatsoever.” On the Internet, no one has to listen to anyone else.

Attention spans haven’t diminished, she believes. “It’s just that there’s so much more to pay attention to, and to contribute to as well. And isn’t this a better pedagogical model for encouraging people to grapple with complexity?”

We oldsters grew up with “fewer sources of distraction and entertainment,” he writes. The TV had four channels. “Digital natives” can avoid even mild boredom, most of the time. They never learn that patience brings rewards.

Jennifer Roberts, a Harvard art and architecture professor, tells students to select a painting in a Boston museum, study it for three hours and write a paper on it.
The duration is “meant to seem excessive,” Roberts says. She wants students to think they’ve seen all there is to see, keep looking and see more.

As part of a book she was writing on 18th century American painter John Singleton Copley, she studied at length the painting A Boy With a Flying Squirrel.

Despite her experience, it took time before “she noticed that the shape of the white ruff on the squirrel matches the shape of the boy’s ear, and is echoed again in the fold of the curtain over his left shoulder.”

Students “need to feel the pleasure of discovering that something you thought you had figured out actually has layers that you had not appreciated,” Willingham writes.

Boring is bad, responds Tim Holt. He accuses Willingham of shouting, Get off my lawn, you damn kids.